Learning to Dance in the Rain

I don’t often plan out my trips. I generally pick out a country or region and choose a starting point, and from there hope to meet enough people that have traveled around the area to round out what I know about a place. It used to be that I bought the lonely planet or rough guide as well and as I went from place to place, I read up about what to do there, its history etc. 

But in recent trips, I have stopped doing that. The Internet is just as robust and much more up to date than any printed guidebook I have found and more environmentally friendly and portable as well. I have become more conservative in some aspects. I generally do book before I arrive, even if it is just hours before hand and tend to use private houses over the hostels though I have stayed in a hostel or two these past few weeks. The thing about hostels is they tend to be filled with 20 years olds and while there is nothing wrong with that, no one wants to be the middle-aged traveler that everyone looks at wondering what happened to them that they couldn’t afford a hotel. Plus even though staying in private houses does not typically introduce you to as many fellow travelers does give you the unique opportunity to meet a local person renting out their house. Which in turn can give you insight into a place that a hostel will never provide. 

I’ve also made it a rule to avoid packaged tours when at all possible, giving in only when time crunches or safety comes into play – and I mean actual danger, not just our illusion of one. Or when they are free and a way to find out a lot in short amount of time, like the free walking tour in Sarajevo.

So suffice to say when I say that Plivtice National Park was the only place in my Dalmatian Coast/Balkans region trip that I wanted to go, that I was excited to visit. I had seen the photos and besides the beaches, which I must visit in every country with a coast, these were the kinds of places I wanted to see. Sure, I love a big city as much as the next girl – I mean I live in one, and I love to visit an old church or monastery and hear about the history of a particular town. But there is something about being surrounded by natural phenomena that gets me like nothing else.

In my head I was going after Mostar. Mostar could have been a day trip from Dubrovnik. I knew that. If I had just booked a tour, I could have been picked up from my place of lodging, carted there and through border patrol with no issue or time situation and then allowed 3 hours to walk around the old city and see the famous bridge picture in every postcard and every internet site depicting Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. But as I mentioned before I hate tours. So I went with,” I’m going to Bosnia!” And as it turns out, that made all the difference.

As you likely know from previous stories, the bus was 3 hours late due to some dip wad bringing weed across the Montenegro-Croatian border and then the flat outside of Dubrovnik with no jack delayed us further. By then I had met a friend and we thought, “sure why not let’s stay in Mostar a second night.” She also couldn’t believe Sarevejo wasn’t on my list of places to visit and when I thought about it further, I thought me neither. So I adjusted my last week of travel and nixed the trip to the island of Brac in favor of seeing Sarajevo. After all I had just seen the island of Mjlet in the same area of the sea  - how different could they be in the end?

But in the back of my mind, I was still planning on spending a day or two in Plivtice. Plivtice has been named a Unesco heritage site in addition to a natural park and was a series of two greenish blue lakes – upper and lower lake with waterfalls and forests abounding everywhere the eye could see. From what I had read, you could do a 3-4 hour walk or a 5-6 hour walk on the low paths next and over the water and I planned to spend every second possible in this natural amusement park.

That is until I spent the 8 hours getting there. Seven hours on a bumpy bus through the Bosnian countryside through every Podunk town you could possibly imagine with the drivers taking a cigarette break every 30 – 40 minutes.

We got off in Bihac, Bosnia with one bus ride to go only to be told that the road was closed and we’d have to take a bus to god knows where to transfer and take a second jalopy to our destination getting us there at least 2-3 hours later. “Oh hell no,” I thought and maybe said aloud to Kristia, my travel companion. That’s when we went for the taxi and 30 Euros later we were safely installed in our little cabin in the woods. Not without incident of course, but I’ll save that story for another day. The later afternoon had little to no light and the rain, while not hard was falling steadily. 57 degrees had never felt so cold.

The next morning we awoke to the sound of the rain on the roof. The sky was gray and the air brisk. I had heard that the time to see Plivtice was on a sunny day – that that was how you would really appreciate the natural beauty of the place.

But such a day was not to materialize. As with my trip up Chirripó in Costa Rica, up Toubkal in Morroco, to the Sahara desert where it hadn’t rained in 50 years, I was about to experience Plivtice in the rain.

I was briefly chagrinned and then I remembered this sign I saw once while in San Pedro Island, Texas with Perry. It was raining then too. (Go figure). We had been walking around the town (if you could call it that) when we got to a bar. There were signs and sayings everywhere. On the front was a sign that read, “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass – it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

And just like that, it didn’t matter any more that it was raining. We were there to see Plivtice and Plivtice we would see.

 

Plivtice National Park is like no other place I have ever been in my life. And I have been to many places: I have stood next to the rushing falls of Iguaçu. I have stood at the top (and the bottom of the grand canyon). I have stood ogling the red jutting rocks in Bryce and Zion and seen great salt lakes in Bolivia. But this place felt surreal. It felt like I had just stepped off the big screen of a sci-fi fantasy movie and onto the wooden walkway that twisted and turned through the blue-ish green waters of these lakes. Past the rushing waters of small and large water falls falling from strangely shaped rocks. Into caves dripping moisture on my head, the strangely formed cave walls naturally wet all the time. Green leaves a shade of green I’ve only ever seen in paintings.

Fish gathered in schools at the surface of crystal clear waters.

It was a place so foreign, it felt alien. And for a moment I tried to imagine it in the sunshine, light dancing on the water, the sky a deep shade of blue.

And then I stopped. I was learning to dance in the rain and that meant not waiting for the storm to pass nor imagining what it would look like had it passed. 

 It was perfect as is.